Six million people move house

Wednesday 4 February 2004 17:51 BST

MORE than six million people move house every year, national census figures have revealed. One in eight members of the population - or 6.3m householders - changed addresses in the year before the survey was taken in 2001.

The figure was much higher than the 4.8m who had moved before the 1991 census. It suggests that the populations of England and Wales are becoming much more mobile. However, the comparison may be distorted by the housing price slump of the early 1990s.

The census found that those most likely to move live in university towns with large populations of highly mobile students or in inner London.

Some 23.3% of students moved house in the year before the 2001 census. Nearly one in five unemployed also moved, compared to 15% of full-time workers. People are more likely to move when they are young, the census revealed.

More than a third of those aged between 20 and 24 moved house, compared to just 3.6% of those in their late 60s and 70s.

Live-in couples are more than twice as likely to move if they are married. Ethnic minorities are also mobile, with 16% finding a new address.

The most stable areas were the suburban London borough of Havering and Knowsley on Merseyside, where fewer than one in 12 people moved.

Other stable areas were Rochford and Castle Point in Essex, Dudley in the West Midlands, North East Derbyshire, South Staffordshire, and Ellesmere Port and Neston in Cheshire.

One in 1,000 English and Welsh residents had moved from Scotland or Northern Ireland, while one in 150 had moved to England from abroad.

Census findings for the populations of major cities, however, have proved highly questionable, partly because immigrants - and in particular asylum seekers - were reluctant to fill in census forms.